Brakhage
Rating ** Worth seeing
But there remains something troubling about a relatively conventional documentary that aims to cover Brakhage’s life and almost 50-year career, during which he produced several hundred usually silent explorations of objects, light, abstract patterns, and people and places in his life. For one thing, Brakhage’s biography is in his films. For another, his life is messy and multifaceted. But perhaps most important, Brakhage’s great subject is the transformative possibilities of actual and imagined imagery, visionary experiences that cannot be analyzed or described in words: he negotiates the difficult territory between what Barnett Newman called “the chaos of ecstasy” and the formal coherence necessary to art.
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In fact that footage connects all too easily with other elements of Shedden’s film to communicate its main theme: Brakhage is a lovable eccentric. His son Bearthm recalls how changed his father was when possessed by the muse; his first wife, Jane, describes him wandering out late for her call to dinner, muttering strings of numbers, then wandering back into his workroom. Eccentric, yes, but you can talk to him: George Kuchar narrates a series of still photos of Brakhage and describes a pleasant chat they had about filmmaking, sex, and other predictable topics. A little touched, perhaps, but in the end just a regular guy.
In his autobiographical films Sincerity and Duplicity Brakhage ascribes to himself a persona far more conflicted and untamed than the one Shedden offers. This is not to say that Brakhage is unusually difficult as great artists go; he can be kind and generous. One story that Shedden leaves untold is his advocacy and preservation of the films of many of his colleagues. But this story too is contradictory: while praising some, Brakhage went through a period of attacking others, particularly the so-called structural filmmakers, several of whom had been his friends. What I most missed from this portrait was any sense of the fellow who, on the one occasion when I visited him in the 70s, decided to show me a large, beautifully detailed book of medical drawings he owned–all of grotesquely diseased penises. My point is not that Brakhage is a bad–or good–person, but rather that he’s a complex, larger-than-life figure full of surprising impulses: his character, like his work, is extremely difficult to pin down.
By contrast, for every image in a Brakhage film that seems to name or explain a previous one, there are ten that make the previous image more mysterious. Though Sitney calls Brakhage one of the very greatest of filmmakers near the end of Shedden’s film, the viewer who doesn’t know his work is likely to wonder why–a subject on which Sitney can be brilliantly articulate, given a bit more time.
Daniel and Hissen’s film chronicles his struggle, beginning with footage from when the city was still divided. We see Christo lecturing on his plans, arguing with officials, surveying the building, and finally watching the parliamentary debate in which he gained permission for his project by a close vote. We also see Christo making the drawings of the project whose sale financed the wrapping. We see the huge building in which the fabric was sewn together and workmen letting it down from the roof in giant rolls. Finally there are several sequences from 1995 of the wrapped building, one from the air that’s unfortunately accompanied by classical music–a cliched choice that Shedden avoids.
